1. Reservation of Copyright
The disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to copyright protection. The copyright owner has no objection to the facsimile reproduction by anyone of the patent document or the patent disclosure, as it appears in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office patent files or records, but otherwise reserves all copyrights whatsoever.
2. Field of Invention
This invention relates to graphical user interface supporting a method and system for enabling the selection and configuration of complex furniture products. More specifically, this invention relates to enabling the selection and configuration of three-dimensional office furnishing products so as to enable remote order generation of valid and acceptable configurations of those products.
3. Description of Background Information
The sale process for complex products, that is, products that are made up of many interconnected parts, is notoriously difficult, especially when customers are given configuration and product-line choices.
For example, in the office furniture industry, the goal of the sale process is to provide the customer with an acceptable furniture configuration within the customer's price limitations.
From the customer's perspective, an acceptable configuration is one which will provide workspace for their employees within various work-related and space criteria set by the customer. For example, a customer may need to provide, in a given area, sitting work space for a thousand people, where all people have acoustic privacy. A customer's criteria may be complex and often the customer does not really know what they are, other than to know the number of people and the space they will go into.
From the manufacturer's perspective, an acceptable configuration is one which can be manufactured from the manufacturer's product line. That is, an acceptable configuration is a valid, manufacturable configuration of existing component parts.
The sales process is essentially an attempt to reach a convergence on a configuration which is acceptable to the customer (meets all space, price and other requirements) and which is acceptable to the manufacturer (is a valid configuration which is manufacturable).
An office workspace configuration may comprise thousands of parts drawn from an inventory of millions of possible parts. Each workspace may comprise dividing walls or side panels, work surfaces, storage areas, support structure, electrical structure and the like. Even for a given configuration of workspace, there are various qualitative and quantitative options available. Each part may be available in various qualities and in various colors. Some of the parts may not be compatible with parts from other product lines of the same or other manufacturers. Further, any choice made, even for a single part, may affect the entire configuration.
A customer wishing to buy a complex product such as office furniture is faced with an incredible number of interdependent choices.
In the office furniture market at present, a typical sale takes place as follows: A salesperson visits a customer and presents the customer with drawings of some typical configurations of various product lines. The customer selects various options which the salesperson records. At this time all of the sale is taking place in terms of individual parts and not in terms of the final product or even in terms of compound components of the final product. In other words, the customer does not buy a collection of workstations, instead he buys a collection of parts.
Once the customer is satisfied with the configuration, the salesperson goes back to the manufacturer who determines whether or not the configuration is actually possible given the current product line. For example, the customer may have put a shelf on a dividing panel without confirming that the panel could actually support such a shelf. Or a panel may be given a size which the manufacturer does not or cannot manufacture. Accordingly, the manufacturer then tries to build the customer's proposed order using a CAD (computer aided design) system and a collection of known parts. Errors in the customer's proposed order are reported and, in some cases, a best attempt at the order is drawn up. From this best attempt produced by the CAD operators, a list of required component parts is obtained and then a price for the entire configuration is determined for all of the component parts.
This process, so far, can take more than two weeks. The sales person then goes back to the customer with the design, as best it could be done, and the price for this design. This is the first time that the customer sees his actual order drawn out, and usually in two-dimensions. If there were errors in the design, which there usually are, or if the customer does not like the current design, the process is repeated.
After some number of iterations (that is customer to sales person to CAD operator to pricing and back to the customer via the sales person), the customer is finally presented with an acceptable configuration and a price for that configuration.
In a typical sales scenario this whole order process (i.e., convergence to a configuration which is acceptable to both the customer and the manufacturer) takes six sales calls and design iterations.
Even when the customer is satisfied with a configuration and even if it is a valid, manufacturable configuration, there is no simple way for anyone to go back and ask a simple "what if" type of question about the order. For instance, if, in an order for an acceptable configuration, the customer wants to know the effect on price of changing to a different quality panel system, the whole price would have to be redetermined by the manufacturer.
To see why this pricing and configuration process is not simple, consider the change from a high quality panel to a lower quality panel of the otherwise same dimensions. Suppose that the panel has a shelf hanging on it and that the high quality panel can support shelves whereas the lower quality panel cannot support shelves without an extra support. So, a supposedly simple question like "What if I use this type of panel instead of that?" can lead to an entire reconfiguration and repricing of the system. Its often not enough to just change the price of the components being used, sometimes the components themselves have to be supplemented. In some cases, changes may not be possible.
Even from a salesperson's perspective, the inability to price "what if" scenarios has major drawbacks. For instance, if a customer is satisfied with a configuration's layout but still thinks that the price is too high, it is desirable for the salesperson to be able to make qualitative changes to the configuration and show what the corresponding price changes would be. In the case of office furnishings, a salesperson would like to be able to show, at the customer's site and at the time of setting up the configuration, the effects on price of various changes. In that way, convergence to an acceptable configuration can be achieved with greater speed.
In the general field of product configuration, tools have been developed to aid in selection and validation of configurations. One such system is available from Trilogy Development Group of Austin, Tex., and is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,515,524, "Method and Apparatus for Configuring Systems," to Lynch et al, which is expressly incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Lynch describes a constraint based configuration system using a structural model hierarchy. The structural aspects of the model provide the system with the ability to define a model element as being contained in, or by, another model element. The structural model provides the ability to identify logical datatype and physical interconnections between elements and to establish connections between elements.
In order to configure a product, Lynch's system accepts input in the form of requests or needs. Using this information, Lynch's system configures a system by identifying the resource and component needs, constraints imposed on or by the resources or components identified, and the structural aspects of the system.
In the specific area of office furniture configuration, attempts have been made to provide customers with simple CAD systems with which to design their configurations. The problems with these systems include that they are difficult to use, they are inaccurate, they do not provide the customer with a way to determine whether or not he has a valid, manufacturable configuration (so the customer still has to go back to the manufacturer to have configurations manually checked), and they do not have any knowledge of the manufacturer's product line. Further, no proposed systems are able to prepare a configuration and provide a price for that configuration.